An Oasis for the Hungry on I-5

The long Thanksgiving holiday hadn’t even started, but the parking lot at the Harris Ranch Inn & Restaurant was filling with the red-eyed and road-weary.

Beverly Lund, a 46-year-old music industry executive, swung in for a bag of fruit on the way from Los Angeles to the Bay Area. Don Dakin, the owner of a San Diego optical manufacturing plant, took a break for a steak during a family trip to a second home in Lake Tahoe.

Mel Grable had come even farther. The 62-year-old retired teacher had just pulled 520 miles from Medford, Ore., to this oasis of hospitality on the west side of the San Joaquin Valley.

“I have earned my meal,” said Grable, sipping a beer in the bar with his wife, Teresita. Other exhausted travelers slouched on couches covered in cowhides. “This is our seventh time here. We looked forward all day to making it.”

As long as human beings have moved around, there have been places like this, watering holes and way stations along trade routes and footpaths, where travelers could get a drink, a bite and an earful of gossip. But since Sept. 11, highway havens have assumed added importance as more Americans have forsaken air travel for family car trips.

Last year was a good year for Harris Ranch, the giant beef supplier that opened this 40,000-square-foot restaurant in 1977. Business is up another 20% this year, said Kirk Doyle, co-manager of the dining operation.

“We don’t like to benefit from tragedy,” said John C. Harris, the chairman and chief executive of the 14,000-acre Harris ranching, farming and horse-racing empire. But if the customers come, Harris is there to serve them.

By car, by bus, by truck, they roll out of the desolate flatland west of Fresno to buy everything from fuel at the Harris gas stations to 22-ounce rib-eye steaks at the Harris restaurant to almonds grown and stored in 4,000-pound bins on the Harris farm. If they stay in the 153-room Harris hotel, they use towels from the Harris cotton operation.

Half a million pounds of beef are sold in the restaurant each year. This holiday weekend, Doyle said, he will serve 20,000 entrees averaging $13.50 each. Up to 4 million gallons of gas will be sold out of the two gas stations and the airport next door, which John Harris uses each day for the commute in his Cessna 210 from his home in the Sierra Nevada foothills. It’s not a bad showing for an operation that people scoffed at when Jack Harris, John’s dad, decided to open a restaurant in Coalinga. “People said you’re crazy to build a facility like this,” remembered Doyle, who has worked for the Harris family off and on since 1983.

“This was desolate then,” he said, indicating the flat, gray earth and the buzzing freeway in the distance. In many ways, it still is desolate. Almost exactly 200 miles from both Los Angeles and San Francisco, the nearest landmark of any size is the Lemoore Naval Air Station a few miles away.

But even the uninitiated can find their way here pretty easily--all they have to do is follow their noses. Three miles north along I-5 is the Harris Feeding Co. At any given time, 100,000 animals are being fattened to the 1,100-pound weight at which they will be shipped to a slaughterhouse in Selma on the east side of the San Joaquin Valley.

If the wind changes, the acrid odor of cattle easily reaches bathers in the big pool next to the hotel. “I think it lends to the charm of things,” said Doyle.

Not everyone feels that way. “When we drive by, we turn the vents off,” said Kyle Dakin, 43.

Still, at the resort that beef built, nobody apologizes. Legend has it that when an employee pointed out the smell to Jack Harris, he took a deep breath and said, “That’s the smell of money.”

That’s exactly what it’s been. Doyle said 75% of the restaurant’s customers order beef. In the kitchen one day last week, kitchen workers were laying out platters of New York steaks, 60 to a platter. In another corner, a woman was grinding beef into thick patties at the rate of 800 an hour.

Everyone was getting ready for the big holiday. Refrigerator trucks were backed up outside unloading produce. Doyle said the on-site bakery would cook 10,000 biscuits on Wednesday.

Though beef is what made the Harris reputation, raising horses has become John Harris’ passion. More than 500 thoroughbreds graze in spacious, mulberry-lined pens on the 350-acre horse ranch.

One of the nine stallions is Cee’s Tizzy, which sired Tiznow, two-time winner of the Breeders’ Cup Classic. The white stallion commands a stud fee of $15,000; he stood for 100 mares last year.

A horse owned by the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia also is housed there.

Harris concedes that Kentucky breeders are “ahead of us” in racing and breeding success. “But we’ve held our own pretty well.”

In many ways, the Harris Ranch operation is a city unto itself, not unlike the ancient communities that sprang up along the Silk Road. It operates its own water treatment plant and sewage plant. The only supplier it depend on outside the family name is Pacific Gas & Electric Co. for power.

“This is a combination destination resort and stopover,” said John Harris. “Sort of like in the old days on a trading trail. If you hung out long enough, you’d meet a caravan.”

This week, there are a lot of caravans. Each looks forward to its own private sanctuary. “I was telling my cousin about the wonderful, clean restrooms,” said Lund.